Author: Kitty

This post originally appeared on our Tumblr, where we frequently answer reader questions and sometimes post random unrelated things. This is one of those random posts, but it got quite a lot of positive feedback—so we’re posting it in full again here on the blog.

I just got a cat.

When New Cat is named and fully acclimated, she will def join the dogs, guinea pigs, and chickens as a Tumblr/Instagram regular.

But I have… mixed feelings.

My last cat died six months ago. We didn’t get another cat to replace her—c’est impossible, she was irreplaceable. Rather, we did it because we know two things:

A house that’s had a cat in it will always feel empty without a cat in it.

We have money and space and time and patience and love, and shelters are full of cats who don’t got none of those things.

Still, I’ve been thinking about my last cat Clementine a lot. And I think it would be healing to me to share a few photos of her.

A slow start

This was Clementine. We adopted her when she was 14 years old. That’s old. If she were human, she would’ve been in her early seventies. Her previous owner had moved into a nursing home. She was lucky to land in one of the few no-kill shelters with enough resources to accept a cat of her age. Many don’t.

Clementine was terribly stressed out being in the shelter after so many years in one person’s home. Her fur started to fall out, and she refused to eat. She hid all the time and hissed if approached. No one applied for her.

We saw a lot of great cats at the shelter. For some reason, she was the one my partner and I both couldn’t stop thinking about. We talked about it, and decided we had the patience, emotional maturity, and financial stability needed to address the realities of adopting a shy geriatric cat. So we took her home and released her under the bed.

“We might never see this cat,” I told my partner. “We might just know she’s here by periodic dips in the level of the food bowl.”

That sentence may have been easy to read, but you have no idea how hard it was to write!

I mean, I doubt it’s shocking. If given the opportunity, who wouldn’t want to be a caring Internet grandma slash pushy rich best friend who gives great advice but also needs to take it down two notches on a full-time basis?

We’ve been running Bitches Get Riches for just about two years now. We’ve started to get lovely, heartfelt emails from our readers. “I asked for a raise and I got it!” “My first job starts Monday and I wouldn’t have aced the interview without your help!” “I finally moved out and I’m so happy!” Absolutely nothing feels better than hearing you’ve helped someone improve their lives. Nothing.

And that got us to thinking: How many more people could we reach if we could give Bitches Get Riches our all?

That thing we don’t have to do anymore because they’re finally getting married!

Hold on please, my producer is speaking into my earpiece… Okay, my producer is saying that evidently legal integration into the institution of marriage is actually not the final and defining achievement of queerdom.

Our clear-eyed, big-hearted Patreon donors have requested an article on how queerness affects people’s finances. It’s good timing because I just finished watching The Haunting of Hill House and I’ve never felt bi-er! (And yes, before you ask, my official order is Theo > Shirley > Luke > Nell > dead kitten > Steven.)

I am ready and raring to accept my crown as queer queen of bummer-ass articles!

Note: Throughout this article, I will use the word “queer” to encompass all people who are not both cisgender and heterosexual. I’ll talk a lot about gay people and trans people specifically because those are the populations that usually have all the good scientific studies and economic surveys to shellac my ramblings with a gorgeous patina of Facts.

But we love all you aces, aros, bis, enbies, pans, polys, intersex individuals, questioners, queens, and whatever the hell other gender and sexual minorities I left out.

I am not the righteous and principled person I pretend to be on Tumblr.

When we were in Orlando for FinCon, I had one extra day and night to spend any way that I chose.

On my one night free in the city, I walked a three mile pilgrimage from my Airbnb to visit Pulse. Like most people who visit the site of horrible violence, I processed by considering that violence through a selfish lens. These people were my people. This could’ve been me. I thought a lot about the kind of life I want to lead, and how much that life depends on the kindness of others. It left me feeling somehow rejuvenated and drained at once.

The next morning I visited the Harry P. Leu Gardens, because I am the world’s oldest young person. I confess that I have a fascination with this one very niche kind of tourist attraction: the palatial estates of long-dead industry barons transformed into indoor/outdoor botanical art museums. I. Love. Them. I posted many cute photos on Instagram, which were liked by all the people at FinCon I’d drunkenly passed out my personal Instagram to. (By the way we are on Instagram now, but it’s all just pictures of food, dogs, and chickens. If you’re into that, add us @BGRKitty and @BGRPiggy!)

So Piggy and I went to FinCon 2018 in Orlando last week. It was super fun—but we’re not going to do a full run-down because so many great writers have already done so! It’s hard to pick a favorite, but, come on… It’s totally Josh.

We do have some Cliff Notes, though. Those are like Spark Notes, but for old people!

We met many incredible finance professionals eager to share their expertise. Obligingly, we drained them of their knowledge and left them as lifeless husks stacked three deep behind the cabana.

We won two Plutus Awards! Best Blog for Women and Best Blog for Gen Z & Millennials! Unfortunately, this means we must say goodbye to any readers outside those two demographics. <cocks shotgun> START RUNNING, OLDS!

We failed miserably at obscuring our faces in photographs. If you follow us on social media, you probably noticed a whole lot of our faces going on. So the secret is out: we are actually several toddlers standing on each other’s shoulders inside of two trench coats.

There is basically a FinCon: Netherworld Edition of the most powerful and creative women in the industry meeting informally in each other’s hotel rooms. And it was unspeakably inspiring, edifying, and encouraging. We traded monetization tips, then flew naked through the night air like the coven at the end of The VVitch. Oh! Sorry, spoiler alert for The VVitch.

Finally, and most importantly:

All business meetings are automatically improved by virtue of being conducted in line for frozen butter beer after riding a buncha damn roller coasters at Harry Potter World.

The real revelation of this past week was how right things feel for us right now. We really, really, really love what we do. And we’re more committed than ever to doing it. And we’ll probably talk about that more, but… Later.

We have pressing thoughts to share.

On Hogwarts Houses. And money.

It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned #ranked article. Stick around, because I think you’ll find this one…

A quick Google image search for the term shows image after image in the same composition: sad, broken-looking women with bruised faces and smeared mascara. There’s often a menacing figure looming somewhere in the foreground or background. A hand—either her own, or the abuser’s—covers their mouths, preventing them from speaking.

These images are certainly evocative. They’ve been burned into our cultural brain by many years of prevention campaigns.

And they work. Maybe not exactly how they’re meant to, but they certainly influence behavior. I’ve injured my face a few times—a split lip from accidentally head-butting the dog, a black eye from a too-quick turn near my own woodworking project. Every time that’s happened, I’ve felt the concern of acquaintances and strangers in full force. There’s skepticism in their eyes when I explain about the dog or the two-by-four. I can feel them watching me for other signs. It’s both annoying and affirming. The world is full of people with good intentions, and it’s nice to remember that.

But I don’t know how helpful these kinds of images are. There are a lot of people who are in abusive relationships and genuinely don’t know it. When there’s such a codified cultural idea of what an abuse victim looks like and you don’t look like her, it makes it easier to silence your own suspicions that there’s something very wrong in your relationship.

It’s hard to look at a staged photo of a cringing, weeping, blood-splattered woman and say “I think I deserve access to the resources set aside for her.”

There’s a huge spectrum of abusive behaviors and relationships that isn’t captured in this simplistic picture. Abusive relationships aren’t an exclusive plague upon heterosexual relationships. Victims aren’t always women. Abusers aren’t always violent, and the damage often doesn’t leave a mark. And we’re going to talk about one of the most prevalent kinds of abuse today: financial abuse.

As we’ve discussed previously, the Olde Method for merging finances was simple and straightforward:

The Man and Womyn shall meet when they are idiot teenagers. They shall marrie when they are both seventeen years old, after two weeks of casual dates at the soda shoppe. The couple shall thereafter commence cohabitation. The Man shall seek salaried employment, and shield the Womyn’s eyes from their mutual finances, excepting the allowance to keep herself in straight pins, and the house in mutton, and the sheepe in the oat corne, and the rye corne, and the barley. And i ‘t be true the Husband gambles her dowry hence, the Wyfe might not but wend to Reno and return to her father’s home in shame and disgrace. Oye, oye, oye, forever and ever, Amen.

Mmhmm, yep, that’s just how it went!

Because labor outside the home was classically a masculine burden (at least in the last few centuries and at least for middle- to upper-class folks), salaries and investments were largely the purview of men. Women, conversely, were usually tasked with domestic labor and household budgets.

The history of gendered expectations around money is long and bonkers. It was only in the 1960s that women gained the legal right to open a savings account of their own. Until the mid-1970s, banks refused to issue lines of credit to women without their husbands’ permission—and not at all to unmarried women. This is a great example of a situation where the patriarchy makes life unpleasant for all genders of people: women are treated like idiot children, men are treated like the long-suffering babysittersof their life partners. And it was all within living memory for our parents! Jeeeeezuz.

Point being, it hasn’t been a long time at all since couples were legally forced to merge most aspects of their individual finances. (We also invented gay marriage since then. You’re welcome.)

That means that couples today are almost certainly managing their finances radically differently than their parents and grandparents. We have a very shallow bench of examples to pull from! And we’ve made up individualized systems as we go, aided by technology.

Here are the successful ways I’ve seen couples divide, partition, and share their finances. Read More

No matter how you conduct them, they always end up being perfectly splendid. And you can take my word for it—I used to work in special events, and have probably been to about 150 of them. My focus was high-end events. (Like,high-end high-end. Secret Service clearance high-end. Fun fact: most Secretaries of State are accomplished musicians and all of them will get up and play with the band at a wedding if they’ve had a sufficient quantity of wine.) But my own wedding was in a parking lot behind my house. I’ve seen ‘em all!

Today I’m going to take a wee bit of a shit on certain wedding traditions. They’re widely-practiced traditions that myself and many of my friends have partooken in. (Piggy, don’t you dare change “partooken” to “partaken” when you edit this!*)

For example, I’m going to shit on (spoiler alert) wedding showers. Now, Piggy had a wedding shower—an extremely traditional wedding shower, with tea and tiny sandwiches and everything! And I LOVED it! We had a blast. I would get together and eat tiny sandwiches with friends and strangers any day of the week. My love for tiny sandwiches really cannot be overstated.

What I’m criticizing isn’t this event—but rather, the weird historical power structures and social pressures that dictated the terms of this tradition. Don’t feel the need to rush to the comments to defend why you did your wedding the way you did. It’s extremely understandable why people follow traditions. It’s also not my business.

But they pay me the big bucks to be an opinionated old person. And I’ve got hot takes on the wedding industry spilling out of my eyes, nose, and mouth like liquid-hot adamantium. The weight of my opinions is so heavy that it drops me to the bottom of a tank of water with a metallic clang.

Today, we’ll be tackling the second most annoying chore: doing the laundry. I understand that some parents still expect their children to do their own laundry, but they are rare. This is understandable given the surprisingly high stakes. Getting the laundry wrong can be a pretty bad situation, as we shall discuss below in moar embarrassing chores-gone-awry stories!

The result is a whole lot of young adults who don’t necessarily know what they’re doing in the laundry room. It’s okay, no judgements here. This article will give you the extremely zen vibe you need to succeed.

Step One: Don’t buy pain-in-the-ass clothes

I’m not precious about my clothing. Some people are, and there is nothing wrong with that, because clothing can be a large investment and an important expression of personal identity. If you really love your clothing and want to nurture them right, follow a more detailed guide like this one instead. Luxey knows her craft and everyone should listen to her.

My personal philosophy, which many of you probably relate to, is that high-maintaince clothing is not worth it. No matter how much I love something, I won’t buy it if it must be washed by vestal virgins and rinsed in the tears of a mermaid by the light of a gibbous quarter-moon. If I wear it frequently, it has to be easy to care for.

Bottom line, your clothing should suit your lifestyle, not the other way around. I can’t be the only person who owned a few dry-clean only things, and never chose to wear them because it meant adding an extra chore to my schedule. Which is very busy. With important things. Like pretending to be a space marine in my video games. Plus dry cleaners charge women more for no reason. So now I just don’t get those things, and we all live happily ever after.

I often fall into the trap of seeing a cost estimate online and thinking, “Ah, I, savvy anti-consumer than I am, shall devise a way to get the same results for a fraction of the price!” So I slave over making something, fixing something, finding something… and then I pass by the exact item I just made, sitting on the shelf of Home Goods, for twenty dollars less than the price I just paid to make it myself.

Why does this happen? I was raised with the general truism that making something yourself is less expensive than buying it new. And I think this used to be the case with almost everything.

But our world has changed a lot in a short amount of time. Certainly for our grandmothers, it was cheaper to sew their own dresses than buy them from a catalogue. But big, global economic factors have pulled down production prices for almost everything under the sun. And that has a huge effect on whether DIYing something is really going to save you money.